The first part of the sixth and final season of The Crown, Peter Morgan’s historical drama that follows the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, debuted last week to a dismal 36.9 million viewing hours and 11 million views.
The first volume, consisting of four episodes was released on Thursday, Nov. 16. The second volume will consist of six episodes and release on Dec. 14.
The previous season, which was released in its 10-episode entirety on Wednesday, November 9, 2022 -- just months after the deaths of real-British royalty Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II -- premiered with a strong 107.4 million viewing hours.
Beyond introducing a new priority metric in June, which measured the number of actual program views, Netflix hasn't publicly disclosed any major change to the methodology for its weekly Global Top 10 Ranker. But consistently this year, it's returning shows have been off from their prior seasons. In the case of The Crown, they are way off.
Last week’s rankings: David Fincher's 'The Killer' Hits Its Mark, But Overall Viewing Was Down a Crushing 31% — Netflix Weekly Rankings for Nov. 6-12
Despite spending a nearly six season run as one of Netflix’s most critically acclaimed pieces of original content, reviews for this season of the royal biopic series are much harsher: The Guardian, for example called it “so bad it’s basically an out-of-body experience.”
In terms of Rotten Tomatoes aggregation, the numbers have been steadily dropping for The Crown, with the first stanza of season 6 dropping to a 55%. Consider season 4 aggregated at 96%.
Meanwhile, among other Netflix measurement quadrants for the week of Nov. 13-19, Matt Rife’s stand-up comedy special Natural Selection landed at second place among Netflix’s English series with 7.9 million views.
That’s a fairly strong number for a Netflix standup special -- consider that Tom Segura’s Sledgehammer debuted to 4.6 million hours back in July.
Less happily for Netflix, that relatively paltry number ranked as the second biggest audience in what is typically Netflix's biggest ratings category.
In fact, we compiled the viewing hours for all of Netflix’s four categories this week, tallying the total hours to compare to the equivalent week from last year (November 13-19, 2022), and found that overall viewing was down nearly 34%.
Streaming in the English language series category took an even bigger hit, with Netflix generating barely 40% of the viewer traffic it had last year.
And after slowly growing its audience over the past three weeks, World War II-based historical miniseries drama All the Light We Cannot See fell in a big way, ending last week with 21.7 million hours viewed. That’s just barely over half of what it earned the week prior.
On the film side, David Fincher's action thriller The Killer lost momentum from its premiere a week prior, bleeding over 10 million hours and ending the week with 44.5 million hours viewed.
